A Japanese film that tells the tale of the birth of VHS. It follows Kagatani Shizuo, an electronics employee who rallies his coworkers to save their jobs by increasing sales. They do this by developing the VHS standard. They battle with Sony and their standard and ultimately prevail.
Acting
Toshiyuki Nishida's quiet desperation as salaryman savior
Production
Painstakingly period-perfect 1970s JVC offices
Writing
Makes format wars genuinely suspenseful
Director
Kiyoshi Sasabe
Toshiyuki Nishida
Kagaya
Ken Watanabe
Okubo
Naoto Ogata
Eguchi
Ryoko Shinohara
Natsuka Kashiwagi
Mitsuko Baisho
Masae Murakami
Tohru Emori
Terayama (President of Sony)
Renji Ishibashi
Kanezawa (Vice-President of Nippon Victor)
Hoshi Ishida
Yuji Kagaya
Jun Kunimura
Koide
Tatsuya Nakadai
Matsushita (Matsushita Denki Co.)
Isao Natsuyagi
Takeda (President of Nippon Victor)
Masane Tsukayama
Watarai (Managing Director of Nippon Victor)
Ippei Kanie
Ikuji Nakamura
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
The film captures 'salaryman cinema,' a uniquely Japanese genre where white-collar drudgery becomes heroic martyrdom. Kiyoshi Sasabe specialized in these odes to forgotten company men.
The real JVC team celebrated by drinking from a wooden bucket of sake — recreated in the film, though the actual engineers reportedly hated the corporate mythologizing.
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